this is the only Plumie ship anywhere around. It could have been
exploring, like us. Maybe it was looking for the people who put up
Space-Survey markers._"
"Maybe," agreed Baird, using the communicator. "Is that stuff about
falling into the sun correct?"
"_It seems so_," said Diane composedly. "_I'm checking again. So far, the
best course I can get means we graze the sun's photosphere in fourteen
days six hours, allowing for acceleration by the sun's gravity._"
"And you and I," said Baird wryly, "have been acting as professional
associates only, when--"
"_Don't say it!_" said Diane shakily. "_It's terrible!_"
He put the communicator back in his pocket. The Plumie had watched him.
He had a peculiarly gallant air, this small figure in golden space armor
with its high-crested helmet.
They reached the engine room. And there was the giant drive shaft of the
_Niccola_, once wrapped with yard-thick coils which could induce an
incredible density of magnetic flux in the metal. Even the return
magnetic field, through the ship's cobalt-steel hull, was many times
higher than saturation. Now the coils were sagging: mostly melted. There
were places where re-solidified metal smoked noisomely against
nonmetallic floor or wall-covering. Engineers labored doggedly in the
trivial gravity to clean up the mess.
"It's past repair," said Baird, to the ship's first engineer.
"It's junk," said that individual dourly. "Give us six months and a place
to set up a wire-drawing mill and an insulator synthesizer, and we could
rebuild it. But nothing less will be any good."
The Plumie stared at the drive. He examined the shaft from every angle.
He inspected the melted, and partly-melted, and merely burned-out
sections of the drive coils. He was plainly unable to understand in any
fashion the principle of the magnetronic drive. Baird was tempted to try
to explain, because there was surely no secret about a ship drive, but he
could imagine no diagrams or gestures which would convey the theory of
what happened in cobalt-steel when it was magnetized beyond one hundred
thousand Gauss' flux-density. And without that theory one simply couldn't
explain a magnetronic drive.
They left the engine room. They visited the rocket batteries. The
generator room was burned out, like the drive, by the inconceivable
lightning bolt which had passed between the ships on contact. The Plumie
was again puzzled. Baird made it clear that the generator-room supplied
electric current for the ship's normal lighting-system and services. The
Plumie could grasp that idea. They examined the crew's quarters, and the
mess room, and the Plumie walked confidently among the members of the
human crew, who a little while since had tried so painstakingly to
destroy his vessel. He made a good impression.
"These little guys," said a crewman to Baird, admiringly, "they got
something. They can handle a ship! I bet they could almost make that ship
of theirs play checkers!"
"Close to it," agreed Baird. He realized something. He pulled the
communicator from his pocket. "Diane! Contact the skipper. He wanted
observations. Here's one. This Plumie acts like soldiers used to act in
ancient days--when they wore armor. And we have the same reaction! They
will fight like the devil, but during a truce they'll be friendly,
admiring each other as scrappers, but ready to fight as hard as ever when
the truce is over. We have the same reaction! Tell the skipper I've an
idea that it's a part of their civilization--maybe it's a necessary part
of any civilization! Tell him I guess that there may be necessarily
parallel evolution of attitudes, among rational races, as there are
parallel evolutions of eyes and legs and wings and fins among all animals
everywhere! If I'm right, somebody from this ship will be invited to tour
the Plumie! It's only a guess, but tell him!"
"_Immediately_," said Diane.
* * * * *
The Plumie followed gallantly as Baird made a steep climb up what once
was the floor of a corridor. Then Taine stepped out before them. His eyes
burned.
"Giving him a clear picture, eh?" he rasped. "Letting him spy out
everything?"
Baird pressed the communicator call for the radar room and said coldly:
"I'm obeying orders. Look, Taine! You were picked for your job because
you were a xenophobe. It helps in your proper functioning. But this
Plumie is here under a flag of truce--"
"Flag of truce!" snarled Taine. "It's vermin! It's not human! I'll--"
"If you move one inch nearer him," said Baird gently, "just one inch--"
The skipper's voice bellowed through the general call speakers all over
the ship:
"_Mr. Taine! You will go to your quarters, under arrest! Mr. Baird, burn
him down if he hesitates!_"
Then there was a rushing, and scrambling figures appeared and were all
about. They were members of the _Niccola's_ crew, sent by the skipper.
They regarded the Plumie with detachment, but Taine with a wary
expectancy. Taine turned purple with fury. He shouted. He raged. He
called Baird and the others Plumie-lovers and vermin-worshipers. He
shouted foulnesses at them. But he did not attack.
When, still shouting, he went away, Baird said apologetically to the
Plumie:
"He's a xenophobe. He has a pathological hatred of strangers--even of
strangeness. We have him on board because--"
Then he stopped. The Plumie wouldn't understand, of course. But his eyes
took on a curious look. It was almost as if, looking at Baird, they
twinkled.
Baird took him back to the skipper.
"He's got the picture, sir," he reported.
The Plumie pulled out his sketch plate. He drew on it. He offered it. The
skipper said heavily:
"You guessed right, Mr. Baird. He suggests that someone from this ship go
on board the Plumie vessel. He's drawn two pressure-suited figures going
in their air lock. One's larger than the other. Will you go?"
"Naturally!" said Baird. Then he added thoughtfully: "But I'd better
carry a portable scanner, sir. It should work perfectly well through a
bronze hull, sir."
The skipper nodded and began to sketch a diagram which would amount to an
acceptance of the Plumie's invitation.
This was at 07 hours 40 minutes ship time. Outside the sedately rotating
metal hulls--the one a polished blue-silver and the other a glittering
golden bronze--the cosmos continued to be as always. The haze from
explosive fumes and rocket-fuel was, perhaps, a little thinner. The
brighter stars shone through it. The gas-giant planet outward from the
sun was a perceptible disk instead of a diffuse glow. The oxygen-planet
to sunward showed again as a lighted crescent.
Presently Baird, in a human spacesuit, accompanied the Plumie into the
_Niccola's_ air lock and out to emptiness. His magnetic-soled shoes clung
to the _Niccola's_ cobalt-steel skin. Fastened to his shoulder there was
a tiny scanner and microphone, which would relay everything he saw and
heard back to the radar room and to Diane.
She watched tensely as he went inside the Plumie ship. Other screens
relayed the image and his voice to other places on the _Niccola_.
He was gone a long time. From the beginning, of course, there were
surprises. When the Plumie escort removed his helmet, on his own ship,
the reason for the helmet's high crest was apparent. He had a high crest
of what looked remarkably like feathers--and it was not artificial. It
grew there. The reason for conventionalized plumes on bronze survey
plates was clear. It was exactly like the reason for human features or
figures as decorative additions to the inscriptions on Space Survey
marker plates. Even the Plumie's hands had odd crestlets which stood out
when he bent his fingers. The other Plumies were no less graceful and no
less colorful. They had equally clear soprano voices. They were equally
miniature and so devoid of apparent menace.
But there were also technical surprises. Baird was taken immediately to
the Plumie ship's engine room, and Diane heard the sharp intake of breath
with which he appeared to recognize its working principle. There were
Plumie engineers working feverishly at it, attempting to discover
something to repair. But they found nothing. The Plumie drive simply
would not work.
They took Baird through the ship's entire fabric. And their purpose, when
it became clear, was startling. The Plumie ship had no rocket tubes. It
had no beam-projectors except small-sized objects which were--which must
be--their projectors of tractor and pressor beams. They were elaborately
grounded to the ship's substance. But they were not originally designed
for ultra-heavy service. They hadn't and couldn't have the enormous
capacity Baird had expected. He was astounded.
* * * * *
When he returned to the _Niccola_, he went instantly to the radar room to
make sure that pictures taken through his scanner had turned out well.
And there was Diane.
But the skipper's voice boomed at him from the wall.
"_Mr. Baird! What have you to add to the information you sent back?_"
"Three items, sir," said Baird. He drew a deep breath. "For the first,
sir, the Plumie ship is unarmed. They've tractor and pressor beams for
handling material. They probably use them to build their cairns. But they
weren't meant for weapons. The Plumies, sir, hadn't a thing to fight with
when they drove for us after we detected them."
The skipper blinked hard.
"_Are you sure of that, Mr. Baird?_"
"Yes, sir," said Baird uncomfortably. "The Plumie ship is an exploring
ship--a survey ship, sir. You saw their mapping equipment. But when they
spotted us, and we spotted them--they bluffed! When we fired rockets at
them, they turned them back with tractor and pressor beams. They drove
for us, sir, to try to destroy us with our own bombs, because they didn't
have any of their own."
The skipper's mouth opened and closed.
"Another item, sir," said Baird more uncomfortably still. "They don't use
iron or steel. Every metal object I saw was either a bronze or a light
metal. I suspect some of their equipment's made of potassium, and I'm
fairly sure they use sodium in the place of aluminum. Their atmosphere's
quite different from ours--obviously! They'd use bronze for their ship's
hull because they can venture into an oxygen atmosphere in a bronze ship.
A sodium-hulled ship would be lighter, but it would burn in oxygen. Where
there was moisture--"
The skipper blinked.
"_But they couldn't drive in a non-magnetic hull!_" he protested. "_A
ship has to be magnetic to drive!_"
"Sir," said Baird, his voice still shaken, "they don't use a magnetronic
drive. I once saw a picture of the drive they use, in a stereo on the
history of space travel. The principle's very old. We've practically
forgotten it. It's a Dirac pusher-drive, sir. Among us humans, it came
right after rockets. The planets of Sol were first reached by ships using
Dirac pushers. But--" He paused. "They won't operate in a magnetic field
above seventy Gauss, sir. It's a static-charge reaction, sir, and in a
magnetic field it simply stops working."
The skipper regarded Baird unwinkingly for a long time.
"_I think you are telling me_," he said at long last, "_that the Plumies'
drive would work if they were cut free of the _Niccola_._"
"Yes, sir," said Baird. "Their engineers were opening up the
drive-elements and checking them, and then closing them up again. They
couldn't seem to find anything wrong. I don't think they know what the
trouble is. It's the _Niccola's_ magnetic field. I think it was our field
that caused the collision by stopping their drive and killing all their
controls when they came close enough."
"_Did you tell them?_" demanded the skipper.
"There was no easy way to tell them by diagrams, sir."
Taine's voice cut in. It was feverish. It was strident. It was
triumphant.
"_Sir! The _Niccola_ is effectively a wreck and unrepairable. But the
Plumie ship is operable if cut loose. As weapons officer, I intend to
take the Plumie ship, let out its air, fill its tanks with our air, start
up its drive, and turn it over to you for navigation back to base!_"
[Illustration]
Baird raged. But he said coldly:
"We're a long way from home, Mr. Taine, and the Dirac pusher drive is
slow. If we headed back to base in the Plumie ship with its Dirac pusher,
we'd all be dead of old age before we'd gone halfway."
"_But unless we take it_," raged Taine, "_we hit this sun in fourteen
days! We don't have to die now! We can land on the oxygen planet up
ahead! We've only to kill these vermin and take their ship, and we'll
live!_"
Diane's voice said dispassionately:
"Report. A Plumie in a pressure suit just came out of their air lock.
It's carrying a parcel toward our air lock."
Taine snarled instantly:
"_They'll sneak something in the _Niccola_ to blast it, and then cut free
and go away!_"
[Illustration]
The skipper said very grimly:
"_Mr. Taine, credit me with minimum brains! There is no way the Plumies
can take this ship without an atomic bomb exploding to destroy both
ships. You should know it!_" Then he snapped: "_Air lock area, listen for
a knock, and let in the Plumie or the parcel he leaves._"
There was silence. Baird said very quietly:
"I doubt they think it possible to cut the ships apart. A torch is no
good on thick silicon bronze. It conducts heat too well! And they don't
use steel. They probably haven't a cutting-torch at all."
* * * * *
From the radar room he watched the Plumie place an object in the air lock
and withdraw. He watched from a scanner inside the ship as someone
brought in what the Plumie had left. An electronics man bustled forward.
He looked it over quickly. It was complex, but his examination suddenly
seemed satisfying to him. But a grayish vapor developed and he sniffed
and wrinkled his nose. He picked up a communicator.
"_Sir, they've sent us a power-generator. Some of its parts are going bad
in our atmosphere, sir, but this looks to me like a hell of a good idea
for a generator! I never saw anything like it, but it's good! You can set
it for any voltage and it'll turn out plenty juice!_"
"_Put it in helium_," snapped the skipper. "_It won't break down in that!
Then see how it serves!_"
In the radar room, Baird drew a deep breath. He went carefully to each of
the screens and every radar. Diane saw what he was about, and checked
with him. They met at the middle of the radar room.
"Everything's checked out," said Baird gravely. "There's nothing else
around. There's nothing we can be called on to do before something
happens. So ... we can ... act like people."
Diane smiled very faintly.
"Not like people. Just like us." She said wistfully: "Don't you want to
tell me something? Something you intended to tell me only after we got
back to base?"
He did. He told it to her. And there was also something she had not
intended to tell him at all--unless he told her first. She said it now.
They felt that such sayings were of the greatest possible importance.
They clung together, saying them again. And it seemed wholly monstrous
that two people who cared so desperately had wasted so much time acting
like professional associates--explorer-ship officers--when things like
this were to be said ...
As they talked incoherently, or were even more eloquently silent, the
ship's ordinary lights came on. The battery-lamp went on.
"We've got to switch back to ship's circuit," said Baird reluctantly.
They separated, and restored the operating circuits to normal. "We've got
fourteen days," he added, "and so much time to be on duty, and we've a
lost lifetime to live in fourteen days! Diane--"
She flushed vividly. So Baird said very politely into the microphone to
the navigation room:
"Sir, Lieutenant Holt and myself would like to speak directly to you in
the navigation room. May we?"
"_Why not?_" growled the skipper. "_You've noticed that the Plumie
generator is giving the whole ship lights and services?_"
"Yes, sir," said Baird. "We'll be there right away."
* * * * *
They heard the skipper's grunt as they hurried through the door. A moment
later the ship's normal gravity returned--also through the Plumie
generator. Up was up again, and down was down, and the corridors and
cabins of the _Niccola_ were brightly illuminated. Had the ship been
other than an engineless wreck, falling through a hundred and fifty
million miles of emptiness into the flaming photosphere of a sun,
everything would have seemed quite normal, including the errand Baird and
Diane were upon, and the fact that they held hands self-consciously as
they went about it.
They skirted the bulkhead of the main air tank. They headed along the
broader corridor which went past the indented inner door of the air lock.
They had reached that indentation when Baird saw that the inner air-lock
door was closing. He saw a human pressure suit past its edge. He saw the
corner of some object that had been put down on the air-lock floor.
Baird shouted, and rushed toward the lock. He seized the inner handle and
tried to force open the door again, so that no one inside it could emerge
into the emptiness without. He failed. He wrenched frantically at the
control of the outer door. It suddenly swung freely. The outer door had
been put on manual. It could be and was being opened from inside.
"Tell the skipper," raged Baird. "Taine's taking something out!" He tore
open a pressure-suit cupboard in the wall beside the lock door. "He'll
make the Plumies think it's a return-gift for the generator!" He eeled
into the pressure suit and zipped it up to his neck. "The man's crazy! He
thinks we can take their ship and stay alive for a while! Dammit, our air
would ruin half their equipment! Tell the skipper to send help!"
He wrenched at the door again, jamming down his helmet with one hand. And
this time the control worked. Taine, most probably, had forgotten that
the inner control was disengaged only when the manual was actively in
use. Diane raced away, panting. Baird swore bitterly at the slowness of
the outer door's closing. He was tearing at the inner door long before it
could be opened. He flung himself in and dragged it shut, and struck the
emergency air-release which bled the air lock into space for speed of
operation. He thrust out the outer door and plunged through.
His momentum carried him almost too far. He fell, and only the magnetic
soles of his shoes enabled him to check himself. He was in that singular
valley between the two ships, where their hulls were impregnably welded
fast. Round-hulled Plumie ship, and ganoid-shaped _Niccola_, they stuck
immovably together as if they had been that way since time began. Where
the sky appeared above Baird's head, the stars moved in stately
procession across the valley roof.
He heard a metallic rapping through the fabric of his space armor. Then
sunlight glittered, and the valley filled with a fierce glare, and a man
in a human spacesuit stood on the _Niccola's_ plating, opposite the
Plumie air lock. He held a bulky object under his arm. With his other
gauntlet he rapped again.
"You fool!" shouted Baird. "Stop that! We couldn't use their ship,
anyhow!"
His space phone had turned on with the air supply. Taine's voice snarled:
"_We'll try! You keep back! They are not human!_"
But Baird ran toward him. The sensation of running upon magnetic-soled
shoes was unearthly: it was like trying to run on fly-paper or
bird-lime. But in addition there was no gravity here, and no sense of
balance, and there was the feeling of perpetual fall.
There could be no science nor any skill in an encounter under such
conditions. Baird partly ran and partly staggered and partly skated to
where Taine faced him, snarling. He threw himself at the other man--and
then the sun vanished behind the bronze ship's hull, and only stars moved
visibly in all the universe.
* * * * *
But the sound of his impact was loud in Baird's ears inside the suit.
There was a slightly different sound when his armor struck Taine's, and
when it struck the heavier metal of the two ships. He fought. But the
suits were intended to be defense against greater stresses than human
blows could offer. In the darkness, it was like two blindfolded men
fighting each other while encased in pillows.
Then the sun returned, floating sedately above the valley, and Baird
could see his enemy. He saw, too, that the Plumie air lock was now open
and that a small, erect, and somehow jaunty figure in golden space armor
stood in the opening and watched gravely as the two men fought.
Taine cursed, panting with hysterical hate. He flung himself at Baird,
and Baird toppled because he'd put one foot past the welded boundary
between the _Niccola's_ cobalt steel and the Plumie ship's bronze. One
foot held to nothing. And that was a ghastly sensation, because if Taine
only rugged his other foot free and heaved--why--then Baird would go
floating away from the rotating, now-twinned ships, floating farther and
farther away forever.
But darkness fell, and he scrambled back to the _Niccola's_ hull as a
disorderly parade of stars went by above him. He pantingly waited fresh
attack. He felt something--and it was the object Taine had meant to offer
as a return present to the Plumies. It was unquestionably explosive,
either booby-trapped or timed to explode inside the Plumie ship. Now it
rocked gently, gripped by the magnetism of the steel.
The sun appeared again, and Taine was yards away, crawling and fumbling
for Baird. Then he saw him, and rose and rushed, and the clankings of his
shoe-soles were loud. Baird flung himself at Taine in a savage tackle.
He struck Taine's legs a glancing blow, and the cobalt steel held his
armor fast, but Taine careened and bounced against the round bronze wall
of the Plumie, and bounced again. Then he screamed, because he went
floating slowly out to emptiness, his arms and legs jerking
spasmodically, while he shrieked ...
The Plumie in the air lock stepped out. He trailed a cord behind him. He
leaped briskly toward nothingness.
There came quick darkness once more, and Baird struggled erect despite
the adhesiveness of the _Niccola's_ hull. When he was fully upright, sick
with horror at what had come about, there was sunlight yet again, and men
were coming out of the _Niccola's_ air lock, and the Plumie who'd leaped
for space was pulling himself back to his own ship again. He had a loop
of the cord twisted around Taine's leg. But Taine screamed and screamed
inside his spacesuit.
It was odd that one could recognize the skipper even inside space armor.
But Baird felt sick. He saw Taine received, still screaming, and carried
into the lock. The skipper growled an infuriated demand for details. His
space phone had come on, too, when its air supply began. Baird explained,
his teeth chattering.
"_Hah!_" grunted the skipper. "_Taine was a mistake. He shouldn't ever
have left ground. When a man's potty in one fashion, there'll be cracks
in him all over. What's this?_"
The Plumie in the golden armor very soberly offered the skipper the
object Taine had meant to introduce into the Plumie's ship. Baird said
desperately that he'd fought against it, because he believed it a booby
trap to kill the Plumies so men could take their ship and fill it with
air and cut it free, and then make a landing somewhere.
"_Damned foolishness!_" rumbled the skipper. "_Their ship'd begin to
crumble with our air in it! If it held to a landing--_"
Then he considered the object he'd accepted from the Plumie. It could
have been a rocket war head, enclosed in some container that would
detonate it if opened. Or there might be a timing device. The skipper
grunted. He heaved it skyward.
The misshapen object went floating away toward emptiness. Sunlight smote
harshly upon it.
"_Don't want it back in the _Niccola__," growled the skipper, "_but just to
make sure--_"
He fumbled a hand weapon out of his belt. He raised it, and it spurted
flame--very tiny blue-white sparks, each one indicating a pellet of metal
flung away at high velocity.
One of them struck the shining, retreating container. It exploded with a
monstrous, soundless, violence. It had been a rocket's war head. There
could have been only one reason for it to be introduced into a Plumie
ship. Baird ceased to be shaky. Instead, he was ashamed.
The skipper growled inarticulately. He looked at the Plumie, again
standing in the golden ship's air lock.